Yoav Di-Capua. No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. xv + 355 pp. $35.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-226-50350-9.
Reviewed by Micah Hughes
Published on H-Ideas (August, 2019)
Commissioned by Aidan Beatty (University of Pittsburgh)
Edward Said once remarked after meeting the would drastically reorient Arab intellectuals’ in‐ famed French philosopher that although he was vestment in Sartre and existentialism as a philo‐ “once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul sophical and political practice of freedom in the Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from aftermath of colonialism. Prior to these two mo‐ view.”[1] Said’s unfavorable account of his meet‐ ments, especially the Six-Day War in 1967, Sartre ing with Sartre and his withered prominence in had shown sustained interest in the politics of de‐ Europe and beyond was published in 2000 but re‐ colonization in the Middle East and the plight of counted a meeting between the two that occurred the Palestinians. However, his dedication to decol‐ more than twenty years prior, in 1979. His obser‐ onization in the region was marked by ambiva‐ vation comes as no surprise to those familiar with lence towards Palestinian claims to territorial the postwar French intellectual context in which sovereignty in the face of European guilt for the existentialism had given way to criticisms of hu‐ Holocaust. In the words of Peter Makhlouf, Said’s manism, frst articulated in the linguistic and account of Sartre “attempt[ed] to assess the con‐ philosophical anthropology of structuralism and founding irony that Sartre and his indefatigable then, later, in the various currents of thought of‐ mind—moving at ease between phenomenology, ten bound together by the vague designation literature, and dialectics—could be so obtuse on “poststructuralism.” But as Said knew well, the question of Palestine.”[2] Sartre’s fear of ap‐ Sartre’s fame and accompanying dismissal was pearing biased towards Palestinians over Israelis not unique to continental Europe, but extended and vice versa was not his alone; notably, Simone transnationally and was intimately connected to de Beauvoir and Claude Lanzmann were also global political events in Algeria (Sartre’s support heavily involved in Sartre’s interest in and hesi‐ for the Algerian resistance and his foreword to tancy to take a clear, committed position on the Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth [1961] status of Palestinian liberation. Yet despite this, are well known) as well as in Egypt, Palestine, and Sartre was an important interlocutor with whom Iraq. Arab intellectuals articulated a notion of “Arab ex‐ Said’s negative encounter with Sartre was istentialism,” which seemed to suggest an exit preceded and colored by a series of important from the political and philosophical aporia that Arab defeats at the hands of the Israeli military, plagued processes of decolonization. frst in 1967 and then in 1973—two events that H-Net Reviews
Enter No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul cal and philosophical signifcance, inadvertently Sartre and Decolonization, Yoav Di-Capua’s well- echoing and extending the feminist maxim that researched intellectual history, which tells the sto‐ the “personal is political.” In focusing on the par‐ ry of the rise and fall of Arab existentialism (wu‐ ticular life stories, writings, and activities of Arab judiyya) in the 1950s and 60s. No Exit is a history intellectuals like Abd al-Rahman Badawi, Fayiz of a generation of Arab thinkers born in the 1920s Sayigh, Liliane and Lutf al-Khuli, Suhayl Idris, who came of age intellectually at the end of em‐ and others, No Exit moves away from Jean-Paul pire in the midst of the perils and promises of that Sartre as the authoritative center of existential‐ early twentieth-century conjuncture. Coming of ism’s political-philosophical project and shows age just prior to the “closure” of colonialism, this how theory traveled back and forth between new generation (al-jil al-jadid) saw the aftermaths metropole and periphery and was creatively en‐ of the First World War, the eclipse of Pan-Is‐ gaged by Arab intellectuals in the conjuncture of lamism, the erosion of the Ottoman Empire, and decolonial liberation. the restructuring of territories through mandates Di-Capua’s narrative approach to intellectual in its wake. The prehistories of decolonization, history invites the reader to reimagine what not explicitly addressed in the book but made am‐ counts as the privileged agent of postcolonial cos‐ ply evident in the archive of biographical story‐ mopolitan mobility. While the discourse of “com‐ telling expressed in this work (pp. 13-23), are mitment” (iltizam) and notions of radical human marked by a collective sense of failure—failure to freedom belonged to a Sartrean corpus, it would adequately address the new political and existen‐ be a mistake to see the philosophical language tial crisis of imperial debris and destruction that and literary imagination of existentialism itself as faced societies around the world, alongside the the only mobile element in the movement of Arab failure to draw forth a lexicon of liberatory dis‐ existentialists. By tracing the theoretical commit‐ courses and concepts (freedom, authenticity, au‐ ments of this postcolonial generation through tonomy, dignity, etc.) seen as adequate to the de‐ their life stories, Di-Capua shows his readers that colonial task.[3] Set within the political-discursive what made Sartrean existentialism important to framing of Pan-Arabism, Arab nationalism, as the Arab project of decolonization was the labor well as Third Worldist ideologies of liberation, Di- of Arab intellectual actors and networks across Capua’s book carefully traces the contours of de‐ the Middle East and Europe who read, discussed, colonization and transnational philosophical dis‐ disseminated, and debated philosophical and lit‐ course as interrelated processes in which this erary texts that spoke to a shared global moment “new” generation of artists, activists, and intellec‐ of political and social transformation. tuals took up the questions of “freedom, authen‐ No Exit masterfully tells how Arab existential‐ ticity, and sovereignty” (p. 9) as central problems ists of the 1960s, like their counterparts in France, in need of theoretical and practical solutions in came to reject Sartre and seek a philosophical so‐ the crisis of postcolonial subjectivity. lution beyond existentialism. This rejection was Moving away from intellectual history not only aimed at Sartre’s philosophical commit‐ framed solely through the trope of “encounter,” ments, but most importantly at his political hesi‐ Di-Capua’s narrative is grounded in a mode of sto‐ tancy to unequivocally support the Palestinian rytelling, which inverts the model of “reception” cause. In the end, Sartre fell victim to an “ethical that privileges Europe as the locus of philosophi‐ need for a hierarchy of otherness” that pitted the cal production and the rest of the world as the site demands of the Palestinians against those of the of consumption. Di-Capua foregrounds the bio‐ Israelis (p. 248). When he eventually came for‐ graphical and the generational as spaces of politi‐
2 H-Net Reviews ward with a pro-Israeli statement in May of 1967, [1]. Edward Said, “Diary,” Los Angeles Review many of Sartre’s Arab interlocutors felt his actions of Books 22, no. 11 (June 1, 2000), 42-43, https:// amounted to an “iconic act of betrayal,” not only www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n11/edward-said/diary. by Sartre himself, but also by the French Left [2]. Peter Makhlouf, “The End of Intellectu‐ more generally (p. 249). als,” Radical History Review 131 (May 2019): As a work of intellectual history, No Exit will 220-32; 221. be of interest and relevance to historians across a [3]. Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris: On wide range of specialties and subfelds, but the Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke Universi‐ signifcance of Di-Capua’s work extends beyond ty Press, 2013), 5. the historiographical. As a theoretical interven‐ [4]. Makhlouf, “The End of Intellectuals,” 221. tion into the narrative of decolonization, No Exit troubles some of the most stubborn assumptions about who theorizes and who is theorized. It also raises concerns about what theory does as a space for not just thinking politics, but also for interven‐ ing into the political, which is after all, comprised of personal relations and intimacies, especially when you consider those intellectuals, like the young Egyptian ʿAli al-Samman, whose relations with Sartre extended from interlocutor to teacher to friend. To return to Makhlouf’s reading of Said’s encounter with Sartre: “A bizarre discord emerges when one recognizes that Sartre stood by Israel not despite the breadth of his insight but seemingly on account of it. Reckoning, as he did, with the case of Israel/Palestine on the level of ab‐ stract philosophy, his political views were lost in the lofty echelons of theoria.”[4] No Exit afords us the opportunity to return to both of these ele‐ ments—the political and the theoretical—in Arab existentialism as well as in Arab decolonization not as a binary, but as a double movement where theory meets practice on that ground. The archive of Arab philosophers and littérateurs that No Exit makes available in English opens up a space for the historian as well as the postcolonial theorist to return to a moment of decolonial potential and its political-ideological stakes to glimpse acts of polit‐ ical commitment, articulation, hope, struggle, and, ultimately, betrayal that could have been other‐ wise and, yet, still have much to tell us today. Notes
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Citation: Micah Hughes. Review of Di-Capua, Yoav. No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization. H-Ideas, H-Net Reviews. August, 2019.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54392
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